Apple’s iPad Pro won't be arriving any time soon

There’s some bad news for those of you looking forward to getting your mitts on one of Apple’s supersized iPads, as the new tablet seems to have hit a delay, at least according to the latest from the grapevine.

Bloomberg’s sources reckon that the start of production for the iPad Pro (the preferred name as far as we’re concerned, though it could also be called the iPad Plus, or something else entirely different) has been put back considerably.

Production was supposed to kick off this quarter, those insiders said – in other words, this month – but it has now been put back to around September, a six month delay.

Apparently this is due to a hold-up in terms of supplying the screen panels for the larger 12.9in tablet (though some other sources have claimed it will be 12.2in – at any rate, whatever the size, there are apparently supply issues, and fairly serious sounding ones).

It will be a blow to Cupertino, with the company certainly looking to the iPad Pro to help turn around the slump in tablet sales it fell into last year.

In a report last month, delivered by Strategy Analytics, iPad unit shipments for the fourth quarter of 2014 only grew 1 per cent year-on-year, with Apple’s total share of the tablet market dropping to just 26 per cent over 2014 (from 32.6 per cent in 2013). That’s way off the days when Apple comfortably held the majority of the market for a long, long time…

As for the iPad Pro, we might only see it pitch up at the very end of the year from the sounds of things – and perhaps it might not make 2015 at all.